Genie Energy Ltd.

Good morning and welcome to Genie Energy's second quarter 2023 earnings call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by a zero. After today's presentation by Genie Energy's management, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Brian Siegel of Hayden IR.

Thank you, Operator. With me today are Michael Stein, Genie Energy's CEO, and Avi Golden, Genie Energy's TFO, who will discuss operational and financial results. Any forward-looking statements made during this conference call, whether general or specific in nature, are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, those discussed in the reports that we file periodically with the SEC. Jeannie assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements that we have made or may make or to update the factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those that we forecast. During their remarks, management makes reference to adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure. Management believes that its measure of adjusted EBITDA provides useful information to both management and investors that supplement our core operating results. Our earnings release, which is posted on the Jeannie.com IR page, includes a reconciliation of consolidated adjusted EBITDA to its nearest comparable gap measures, consolidated debt income and income from operations, for all periods presented. In addition, adjusted EBITDA for applicable segments are reconciled in the earnings release to their respective segments' income from operations for all periods presented. I will now turn the conference over to Michael Stein, Genie's Chief Executive Officer.

Thank you, Brian, and welcome to our investors and other stakeholders listening today. During the second quarter, we built on our positive first quarter momentum, continuing to add significant numbers of new retail energy customers, expanding and advancing projects within our solar project pipeline, and delivering very strong financial results, including record levels of second quarter revenue and income from operations. At GRE, commodity prices again remained relatively stable during the quarter. In this favorable environment, we pushed to acquire new customers. By quarter's end, we had added 75,000 gross new meter ads in the quarter, more than double the year-ago pace. RCEs increased by 45% to 380,000 and meters by 36% to 381,000. We are now serving more RCEs than ever before in the company's history. Financially, the increase in meter acquisitions is reflected in both our increased sales and marketing spend and in our growing revenue base. Meanwhile, our churn rate dropped to 4.3% from 4.4% in the prior and year-ago quarters. We are particularly pleased with this since churn usually accelerates during higher customer acquisition periods. The current decrease reflects great work from our customer retention team, which is making a more significant impact with each passing quarter. A big shout out to them for a job well done. We will continue to focus on minimizing our churn even as we further build our customer base in upcoming quarters. At Genie Renewables, or GRU, we continue to build out our pipeline of company-owned projects in the second quarter. We gained site control on another five projects, totaling roughly 30 megawatts, bringing the total number of pipeline projects to 15, with an aggregate 108 megawatts of potential power generation. In April, we broke ground on our first community solar project, a project in Perry, New York. And in July, after the quarter closed, we achieved notice to proceed on a second community solar project, This one, a 6.25 megawatt community solar farm in Lansing, New York. Looking ahead, we are making great progress within our development pipeline and expect to gain site control on more potential projects in the second half of the year. The economics of these projects are attractive, and we anticipate retaining ownership in most, if not all of them, to leverage our strong balance sheet and relatively low cost of capital and maximize shareholder value creation. As a result of our strong performance year to date and positive outlook, we are increasing our consolidated 2023 adjusted EBITDA guidance to the $47 to $55 million range from the $40 to $50 million range we forecast at the start of the year. Our upwardly revised guidance also represents a powerful increase from our pre-2022 normalized EBITDA, which was in the $25 to $30 million range. The improvement in our performance reflects our significantly larger customer base, our transition to operating exclusively in domestic retail markets, our proven ability to operate our R&Ps profitably across a wide range of market conditions in those domestic markets, and our focus on operational excellence. We strive to continually enhance our analytics and operational capabilities, and our success is reflected in our bottom line results. Our guidance also includes continued investment in new retail customer acquisitions in the second half of the year. With wholesale energy costs this year remaining at lower levels than last year, we are pursuing targeted opportunities created by higher legacy cost-based rates of certain incoming utilities. This organic growth strategy should enable us to cost-effectively expand our meter base in the second half of the year, albeit at a lower rate of meter adds than in the first half. Looking to the second half of the year for GRU, we are on target to complete construction of our Perry, New York farm and begin construction of the Lansing project. while incrementally continuing to advance and expand our project pipeline. To wrap up, we continue to deliver strong operational and financial results in the second quarter, while significantly increasing our retail customer base and taking significant steps forward in our emerging renewables businesses. We also continue to fulfill our ongoing commitment to return capital to our stockholders by redeeming the remaining preferred stock and paying our quarterly common stock dividends. In all, this was another very strong quarter, and I want to acknowledge the efforts of my Gini colleagues that make it possible. Thank you, team, and keep up the good work. Now I'll turn the call over to Avi for his discussion of our Q2 financial results.